25 August 2017

Sola fides iustificat – Only trust makes things right

In each of the last three
years, in the early hours of
a Friday morning, I have
found myself watching the TV as the result of an election becomes
apparent. As an Alliance,
we work hard to be
impartial between political
parties, and likewise in the
EU referendum we did not
back one side.

But following the vote, my mind turns to what the response of evangelical
Christians might be to this collective
decision that the country has taken.
While we recognise that some may be
elated and others disappointed, our
position is to look to the future and ask
how we should respond in a changing, or
unchanged, context.

Often a cornerstone of our response to any
significant news is to remember that we
trust in a God who created the universe and holds the world in His hands. While we
may be troubled by change, He is not fazed.
When it may seem like the world is moving
too fast, we can hold fast to the knowledge
that God is sovereign. This is both absolutely
true and also runs the risk of sounding trite
and like a cop-out.

After a surprise general election campaign,
and for most a surprising outcome, the
Conservative party formed a government
but without the majority they had before
the vote was called, and further away from
the commanding lead they had hoped for.
Governing therefore required a deal with
the DUP, and this was only agreed after the
Queen’s Speech in which many of the party’s
manifesto pledges were abandoned for a
slimmed down programme focused on the
laws needed to leave the EU.

In this year, 500 years on from Luther’s
publication of his 95 Theses sparking the
Reformation across Europe, the centrality
of God’s sovereignty is rightly being remembered. We trust in God and not in
our own actions.

Amid the uncertainty in politics, in the
wake of terrorist attacks, this is a welcome
reassurance. But there is a danger that we
step away from a world with difficulties
and complexities and say that it’s for God to sort out and not us. We forget
another key lesson of the Reformation,
that all believers are members of a royal
priesthood. We are all created in God’s
image and commissioned to do God’s work
in the world he made.

This means that we step up to engage in
society rather than walking away. God is in
charge, but he chooses to use us to do His
work in this world. It requires that in each
generation, in each new political context
we ask fresh questions of what our beliefs
mean, and how they answer the questions
people across society are asking.

After Luther came Calvin who was
committed to not only reforming the
Church and preaching the gospel in
Geneva, but also improving the city, from
founding the university to developing a
sewage system. The spirituality of Christian
belief should never be disconnected from
the society we live in. Belief is personal, but
it is never private. It is for the good of all of
society.

In times of political uncertainty and
change we remember that God is
sovereign, and we step up to play our part.
But we also have our eyes wide open that opposition is never likely to be far away.
There is always a task to ensure that we are
clear in what we are saying, and considerate
in how we communicate it, but opposition is
not just down to misunderstanding, or poor
communication. There are fundamentally
differing worldviews in society and
Christianity is no longer the dominant
narrative and for Christians seeking to hold
to the truth of the Bible and articulate values
based on this in public life, opposition is to
be expected.

As Christians step up to engage in public life,
especially in politics, there is an even greater
need to trust and be confident in what the
Bible teaches, and in what they believe. We
need to not be thrown when opposition
arrives. Our trust in what we believe, in turn
promotes a more trusting, more truthful
society as a whole.

Following the Grenfell Tower fire Graham
Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington, wrote that we need a restoration of trust. He
concluded by saying: “One of Martin Luther’s
catchphrases was sola fides iustificat, which
can be translated as ‘only trust makes things
right’. Societies thrive with trust: they are
destroyed by mistrust.”

We need to trust in God who is sovereign
above all things. We need to be people of
trust as we step up and lead in a society that
needs people with integrity to speak truth.
And we place our trust in God and not in
the approval of society when our beliefs and
actions are challenged.

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